Z170 Extreme 4 + Samsung 950 Pro = :( SOLVED!!!
Printed From: ASRock.com
Category: Technical Support
Forum Name: Intel Motherboards
Forum Description: Question about ASRock Intel Motherboards
URL: https://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=3076
Printed Date: 28 Sep 2024 at 1:08am
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Topic: Z170 Extreme 4 + Samsung 950 Pro = :( SOLVED!!!
Posted By: EvilDragon
Subject: Z170 Extreme 4 + Samsung 950 Pro = :( SOLVED!!!
Date Posted: 21 Jul 2016 at 7:18am
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Hello! I got this mobo because it was within my price range, and I had hoped I could use my 950 Pro along with it... it sorta works, but I get very bad benchmarks, as if it's not using the full NVMe bandwidth for whatever reason... I later noticed that this SSD is not listed in the storage supported list, but I thought perhaps the latest UEFI update would improve support - I couldn't find the updated list anywhere. So, this is what I have: AsRock Z170 Extreme 4 UEFI version P3.20 Intel i7-6700K 64 GB HyperX Fury 2400 Mhz Windows 10 Pro 64-bit I have also installed Samsung Magician as well as Samsung's NVMe driver. Here are the benchmarks:    UEFI is set to Force M.2, there is nothing connected to SATA ports 0 and 1 (but all others are taken with other drives). I have several other cards connected to PCIe slots too: AsRock Thunderbolt AIC in PCIE6, Firewire controller in PCIE5 and additional Marvell SATA controller in PCIE4. No graphics card - using onboard Intel 530 graphics. PCI DMI ASPM Support and PCH PCIE ASPM Support in UEFI is DISABLED. All possible power saving options in Windows and UEFI are also DISABLED. SATA mode in UEFI is set to AHCI (since I won't be using RAID arrays... is this the catch, perhaps - does this need to be enabled to get full speeds?) Does anybody here have the same combination that works fine? Any ideas as to what could be wrong here? I really hope I won't need to format and reinstall W10 yet again, I have already installed a whole bunch of programs on it... for the 4th time now. :/ Thanks for any insights! |
Replies:
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 21 Jul 2016 at 9:22am
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I think I can basically see why your 950 Pro benchmarks are low, and they are really low. The 950 Pro should work fine in your board, other similar ASRock boards (Z170 Extreme series) have many owners that use 950 Pros, including myself. Some even in RAID 0. We have not seen this issue before now that I can recall. The Z170 and the other Intel 100 series chipsets use the chipset resources for the M.2 slot(s). The PCIe lanes provided by the CPU are not used by the M.2 slot(s) and should have no affect on your 950 Pro. The clue I see is in one of your Samsung Magician screen shots, the last one with the 950 disk information. In the "PCIe Slot" information, the Link Speed Cur : 8Gbps. It should be 10Gbps, like this:  Note the 10Gbps Link Speed Current value (in my older version of Magician). That is what the DMI3 interface of the Z170 should be, the equivalent of PCIe 3.0. Your 8Gbps is like PCIe 2.0, or DMI2. Why you are getting that bandwidth, I don't know, given all you wrote (BTW, thanks for all the information in your post, you saved yourself and me a lot of time) about the power saving options. But that still does not explain your low benchmark results. An 8Gbps x4 interface should be much better than your result. Using RAID or AHCI mode will make zero difference for a single NVMe SSD. You are not using a SATA drive, and the only time RAID makes a difference is for boards that have two or more Ultra M.2 ports, and multiple 950 Pros are in a RAID 0 array. ONLY in that case is the Intel IRST driver controlling the drives. Otherwise it's an NVMe drive, a different protocol than SATA, and uses a different storage controller that has its own entry in Device Manager. The Intel IRST 14 driver provides NVMe support in RAID 0 only, not for single NVMe SSDs. But I think I just figured it out. Here is the fix for you to try, and I'll explain it in a moment. You said you have Force M.2 set to Enabled. Set Force M.2 to Auto, NOT enabled. That's all. To explain what I think is happening, I imagine you've used SATA III SSDs? What does your benchmark results remind you of? It reminds me of a SATA III SSD. There are SATA III SSDs in the M.2 form factor. Is your 950 Pro listed as a drive in the Storage Configuration screen? If it is, it should NOT be listed there at all! It is NOT a SATA drive. My Z170 Extreme7+ board does not have a Force M.2 option, so I cannot test my idea, which is this: The Force M.2 option, when set to Enabled, causes the M.2 slot to operate as if a SATA III M.2 SSD is being used in the M.2 slot. Does that begin to make sense now? DMI2/8Gbps bandwidth is what has been used for SATA III by Intel for years. Although the Magician software is saying you have an x4 connection, IMO that is wrong. Please give that a try and let us know what happens. If you already have tried setting Force M.2 to Auto, do it again for me, please.  I am worried about something, that you installed Windows with Force M.2 configured that way. Did you set any other UEFI option (hint, CSM) for use with your 950 Pro? If after you set Force M.2 to Auto, you no longer can boot Windows, change it back and let us know. ------------- http://valid.x86.fr/48rujh" rel="nofollow"> 
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Posted By: EvilDragon
Date Posted: 21 Jul 2016 at 3:53pm
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950 Pro is NOT listed in Storage Configuration screen, indeed. It's listed in NVMe Configuration screen, but there are no options to set there at all. Just says to which bus it's connected. As far as CSM, I had to reinstall Windows 2 or 3 times because of it, until I figured out that I need to set Storage OpROM to UEFI only, ehhehehe. As far as I remember I think the last time I installed W10 it wasn't set to Force M.2... CSM is disabled now, of course. I will try setting it back to Auto and report. Thanks for the hint! |
Posted By: EvilDragon
Date Posted: 21 Jul 2016 at 3:59pm
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Unfortunately no change! :( Magician still reports 8 Gbps and benchmarks are the same... |
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 21 Jul 2016 at 11:53pm
Oh  I thought I nailed that one! Sorry to hear that!I still think it is suspicious that your benchmark results look like a SATA III SSD. Now that I looked at it again (the Crystal results in particular), the results for the 4K and 4K Q32 are bad even for a SATA III SSD. The high queue depth (Q32) performance of NVMe SSDs is far superior to SATA III SSDs, which we are not seeing in your benchmarks. It is very strange that the Sequential Q32 Read speed is less than half the single file Sequential speed, 525MBs vs 1218 MBs. This is my 256GB 950 Pro on my ASRock Z170 board. Apparently you've never had a result like this:  This is a Samsung 840 Pro in the same PC:  Here's another thing I just noticed. I updated to the latest version of Magician, and got this:  It shows 8Gbps now for my Z170 board's M.2 slot too. I ran Crystal again on my 950, and the result was normal. After checking into this, I learned that DMI 3.0 and PCIe 3.0 are both rated at 8Gbps (or more accurately, 8GTs, 8 Giga-Transfers per second). So the Magician software is now reporting the DMI 3.0 speed correctly. The 10Gbps rate is actually what a DMI 1.0 x4 connection would provide. This is unrelated to your problem. I wonder how correct this data in Magician really is. Meaning is it truly checking the connection bandwidth and width provided to the 950 Pro. Moving on, my thoughts and suggestions for you: Have you ever checked the temperature of the 950 Pro? They run hot, and will throttle their speed at ~70° C. It seems you have nothing covering it, your three cards in the PCIe slots are all below it, and you don't have a video card. What do you use for a CPU cooler? What kind of PC case do you have, and location of case fans? The monitoring programs HWiNFO64 and AIDA64 will display the temperature of your 950 Pro. When I just ran Crystal on my 950 Pro, it reached 54° C. The temperature throttling is a known issue with this SSD, it has been found and reported in many reviews on the Internet. I have a small heat sink on the controller chip, and a fan blowing air over the mother board in that area, so it idles at 34° C, on a warm day like today. The Magician SMART data for the 950 Pro has temperature data, but it is not converted into a true value. I wonder if you have a defective 950 Pro? Have you ever had a benchmark result better than the one you posted? I would remove the 950 from the M.2 slot, but first I would check if it was inserted in the M.2 slot correctly. You have it mounted with that tiny screw, right? Remove it (carefully) and examine the M.2 slot itself. Do all the tiny connections seem fine? All lined up evenly, none shorted together or damaged? Check both sides of the 950's connection end. You could clean the gold contacts with alcohol on a Q-Tip, and if you have that compressed gas for blowing off dust, do a few short bursts (NOT TO CLOSE!!) at the M.2 slot. Looking at the M.2 slot on any board, it's a miracle they work IMO.  Have you tried clearing the UEFI/BIOS? If not, save your current settings in a profile first, and then shutdown the PC, remove it from power, and do a full UEFI/BIOS clear. That is, move the CMOS jumper to the clear position, and remove the board's battery for several minutes. You probably can skip removing the battery, but I would definitely try a UEFI clear. I can't think of any other UEFI options that would cause this issue. I have those DMI ASPM options enabled in my UEFI configuration, which is not causing any problems. I would leave Force M.2 on Auto. You are positive you don't have a SATA drive connected to the SATA3_0 or SATA3_1? The numbering of the SATA ports can be confusing, those two ports are next to each other vertically, not horizontally. Did you check the Device Manager entry for the Samsung NVMe controller? Seems fine in Magician, but who knows? Did you ever run a manual TRIM on it, in Windows, the Properties, Tools, Optimize option? I wonder if the multiple OS installations has it in need of cleanup. This is a weird but fascinating issue. I was hoping changing Force M.2 would work, but did not want to find a bug in the UEFI, which that would be. Please check your 950's temperature first, then do the UEFI/BIOS clear test, and finally the physical removal and inspection. I really want to keep after this one, so let me know! ------------- http://valid.x86.fr/48rujh" rel="nofollow">
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EvilDragon wrote:Posted By: EvilDragon
Date Posted: 22 Jul 2016 at 12:08am
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I have a REALLY KICKASS Fractal Design Define XL R2 big tower (I'm NEVER gonna use anything else, such a great case!!), with Noctua NH-D15 cooling the CPU (both 14 cm fans blowing at it!) and two 14 cm Fractal fans in front taking air in and blowing it on the cards, HDDs (I have 2x2 TB WD Black in the bottom drive tray, I removed the top drive tray to secure more airflow), so by extension also the M.2 drive, hopefully. I really don't think it's thermal throttling, because I don't get temps above 50°C anywhere inside the case... Oh and Device Manager correctly recognizes Samsung NVMe driver... I will check the M.2 card mounting, but yes it's secured with that screw alright... Not sure about this drive being defective, I got it as a gift from a friend of mine who really used it for like a couple of weeks (without fault, might I add) then went onto Intel 750 PCIe drives... I never got better benchmarks than these, certainly nothing even remotely CLOSE to the specs. Yes, I did clearing CMOS multiple times. No change whatsoever. Yes, I did do manual TRIM indeed. Also, I am positive on SATA ports. In fact, on my board SATA 0 and 1 ARE horizontally next to each other ;) Those two are vacant, 100% positive (since the bottom two SATA ports are filled with SSDs, I would notice if one of them wouldn't be recognized due to M.2 stealing a port or two...) |
Posted By: EvilDragon
Date Posted: 22 Jul 2016 at 12:29am
BTW here's a screenshot of System Info for Windows about temps... I think I have a pretty cool machine :) |
Posted By: EvilDragon
Date Posted: 23 Jul 2016 at 3:48am
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Mr. Parsec are you still around? :) |
Posted By: EvilDragon
Date Posted: 23 Jul 2016 at 11:04pm
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I apologize for that. Understand my annoyance on the problem I'm having, though... Here's the same image without any words :)  Could this be the root of the issue, perhaps? |
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 25 Jul 2016 at 1:48pm
No, that is not the problem. What you see with the driver for a storage drive, HDD or SSD of any kind, is normal. My drives are the same way. You are confused about what device the NVMe (or SATA) driver belongs to. That happens all the time to people. The device the NVMe driver is used by is a Storage controller. You have that entry in Device Manager. If you had two or three 950 Pros in your board, you would see three 950 Pros listed under Disk drives, but you would have only one Samsung NVMe Controller. Don't worry about why my 950 Pro entry includes "SCSI", that is a side affect of using RAID mode. Moving on, from an earlier one of your posts:
Sorry, but I see you are in Croatia, so I want to be sure we both know what I mean. Horizontal means a line like this: ------- side to side. Vertical means up and down like this: | This is from your boards manual:   According to your board's manual, the SATA3_0 and SATA3_1 ports are not oriented horizontally. Number 9, above, shows SATA3_0 and SATA3_2 are horizontally oriented. Number 10 shows SATA3_1 and SATA3_3 are horizontally oriented. The SATA3_0 and SATA3_1 ports are vertically oriented to each other. I can only go by the manual, but my Z170 Extreme7+ board has the Intel SATA ports exactly like this. You said, "since the bottom two SATA ports are filled with SSDs...". The bottom two SATA ports are ports 1 and 3, number 10 in the picture, looking at the board like the picture. I think you have a SATA drive in the SATA3_1 port. While having an M.2 SSD in the M.2 slot should disable SATA ports 0 and 1, it seems like that is not happening. It seems the 950 Pro is only getting half the resources it requires, since the other drive is using them, or those resources become unavailable to both drives. If I am right (Please check!) just move the SATA data cable from SATA3_1 to SATA3_2, and see what happens with the 950 Pro. Both of the SATA data cables should be in the SATA ports closest to the board. The temperatures of all your drives, CPU, etc, don't tell the whole story. The 950 Pro is not in that list. You've never used an M.2 SSD before, and don't know how warm they can be. I doubt your 950 Pro is throttling, but you have not provided any temperature data for your 950 Pro. ------------- http://valid.x86.fr/48rujh" rel="nofollow">
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Posted By: LutaWicasa
Date Posted: 27 Jul 2016 at 5:33am
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Sata 3 -0 and 3 -1 are indeed horizontal. View image on page 25  ------------- I7 6700K Z170 Extreme6 2x8 GSkill Rip Jaw 3200 Samsung 512 950Pro NVME EVGA 1070 FTW |
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 27 Jul 2016 at 12:16pm
Funny, very funny... Actually, I like that picture better, thanks!  This shows the orientation of the SATA ports as they actually are on the mother board. It also shows the relationship between the SATA ports and the SATA Express Connector, and how they are all related to the M.2 slot. But, the OP could be saying the SATA3_2 and SATA3_3 ports are on the "bottom", because those two ports are the two bottom ports of the "stack" of ports, IF you are looking at the board's right side edge. For those two ports to be horizontal, the board would need to be laying on a table. I agree this can be confusing, but I choose the manual's pictures as the reference. ------------- http://valid.x86.fr/48rujh" rel="nofollow">
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Posted By: LutaWicasa
Date Posted: 28 Jul 2016 at 1:12am
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Sorry 'bout that....my board is horizontal. Mounted on a caseless benchin' rig  ------------- I7 6700K Z170 Extreme6 2x8 GSkill Rip Jaw 3200 Samsung 512 950Pro NVME EVGA 1070 FTW |
Posted By: EvilDragon
Date Posted: 29 Jul 2016 at 3:53pm
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So yeah, I am 100% positive that there are NO drives connected to SATA0 and SATA1. I've just checked it again... And yes by "horizontal" I meant when you look at the board from the right side laying flat on the floor.  Me being in Croatia doesn't discount for the fact that I've been learning and using English for the past 20 years at least, I do know the difference between horizontal and vertical (hell, Croatian has the same words, along with our own variants of them!) In any case, I also did a bench with ALL SATA ports completely empty (and all PCIe ports empty as well), and it was all the same... By the way, I didn't see anywhere in AIDA64 report of M.2 drive temperature... 950 Pro doesn't show up in Storage->SMART... HWINFO64 is the same, it only says read/write activity. Hm. |
Posted By: EvilDragon
Date Posted: 31 Jul 2016 at 8:41pm
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Does anybody know if there's a way to contact AsRock more directly? I tried e-mailing their tech support about this issue 2 weeks ago and haven't received a single reply... Wish they offered phone support. I'd like to ask when they'll fully support 950 Pro via UEFI (since I don't see it in the official supported storage list, and I wonder why is the drive even working if it's not supported, even though it works slow)... I very much appreciate your help here, parsec, please don't misunderstand. But I really want to switch fully to my new computer, production must keep going, and I'm stuck waiting on replies and suggestions... Not too happy about it, but it's not your fault. I just wish we could figure this out. Let me pose another question to EVERYONE reading: does anybody on this forum have Z170 Extreme 4 AND Samsung 950 Pro working at full speed under W10 Pro? If at least somebody has it working, then I suppose I either have a faulty drive, or a faulty M.2 slot on the mobo... and it seems utterly stupid to me to buy a separate M.2 adapter PCIe card just to be able to use my 950 Pro at full speeds (provided that solution would even work!)... |
Posted By: LutaWicasa
Date Posted: 31 Jul 2016 at 9:25pm
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Not the 4, I am on the 170 Extreme6 using a Sammy 950 Pro NVME M.2 without issue. During my struggle to get things right I had gone into Device Manager/System Devices and manually updated drivers that had anything to do with PCI. Some 11 or so updated to an Intel driver as opposed to the MS...ymmv. Regarding tech support from Asrock...I had an issue that they've not responded to also. ------------- I7 6700K Z170 Extreme6 2x8 GSkill Rip Jaw 3200 Samsung 512 950Pro NVME EVGA 1070 FTW |
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 31 Jul 2016 at 11:46pm
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EvilDragon, I have (had) no idea what your English language skills are. How could I? Your writing of English is perfect, but as we now can see, the way we look at the SATA ports and what becomes horizontal or vertical can be different. All I wanted to do is confirm that there were no SATA drives connected to the SATA3_1 port. That has been done so I'll move on. The apparent inability to see the 950 Pro temperature on your system seems strange to me, I've seen it since the first day I used it:   The AIDA64 temperatures are available in the Temperatures graph in the System Stability Test. I configured this graph to just show the SSD temperatures, and the board temperature. I can see the 950 Pro temperature in the Storage, SMART data display in AIDA64. You can see in the HWiNFO64 Sensor display, there are temperature readings for all three of the M.2 SSDs I have in my ASRock Z170 board. I don't know why you can't get that information in HWiNFO64, unless it is a configuration thing. Any chance the temperature reading is in Hidden Items, in the Layout tab? Or... is the missing temperature reading related to your problem? As far as I know, you are the first Z170 Extreme4 user that has this problem with a 950 Pro. Or the first 950 Pro user that has this problem with any ASRock Z170 board. I'm not saying it cannot happen, or is not happening to you, just a statistic. There must be other owners of this board that use the 950. My guess about no answer from ASRock support is because they have no answer or fix for you. That is the point I am at too. Does your board have in its UEFI, in the Tools section, the UEFI Tech Service feature? That is another way to contact ASRock support. I don't know if the destination of those requests is the same of different than the support page on the ASRock website. Did you try to contact Samsung support about this? What other testing can be done? Nothing simple, but obviously testing that 950 in another board. Or a different 950 or other NVMe SSD in your board's M.2 slot. Very few M.2 NVMe SSDs exist, I have the new OCZ RD400 now, which I removed from its PCIe adapter card just to try it in the M.2 slot, where it works fine. I also tried my 950 Pro in the OCZ PCIe adapter card, to test if it would work as an OS drive connected to a PCIe slot. It works fine that way. The 950 Pro is not included in my ASRock Z170 board's Storage Support list. But the new OCZ RD400 is now included in the list, I don't know why some drives are there, and others aren't. I know this list is meant to help, but if you check the SATA SSD list, it does not include 98% of the SATA SSDs that exist. I know I can use any SATA SSD on any ASRock board. ------------- http://valid.x86.fr/48rujh" rel="nofollow">
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Posted By: EvilDragon
Date Posted: 01 Aug 2016 at 4:04am
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I am going to call Samsung on phone via Skype tomorrow... see what they say. Yes, I do have UEFI Tech Service feature I think... And yes, what you show in the images is simply not there in HWINFO over here. Let me try and unplug then re-mount the 950 Pro and I'll see if anything changes... (EDIT: Nothing changed!)  However, I think I managed to measure temp of 950 Pro with AIDA in system stability as you showed. It said 39°C! I even did the "finger test" and it was really not very hot! So I suppose it isn't anywhere near thermal throttling... (By the way, my comment about English skills was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I know you couldn't have known my experience with English, however it did sound slightly weird to me the way you said "since I'm in Croatia, horizontal might not mean what you think it means", at least that's how it can be read into. Anyways! Nevermind this all - just a little bit of humour, I sure as hell need it in this situation, since this is NOT the only problem I have with this new computer of mine, unfortunately :( |
Posted By: EvilDragon
Date Posted: 05 Aug 2016 at 7:19am
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Mr. Parsec & co., let me update this thread a little. Yesterday I did the Anniversary Update of Windows 10... and see what happened!  I have no idea what fixed this... possibly MS finally introduced proper drivers for this mobo in the install (although I do remember installing all the necessary drivers upon fresh W10 install)... In any case - issue fixed, I now have a properly working 950 Pro thanks to a VERY successful Windows Update! Thanks for putting up with me, I appreciate all the suggestions you gave me! This thread can now be marked as SOLVED!!! :) |
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 05 Aug 2016 at 12:14pm
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Wow, great! Thanks for letting us know what happened. I don't agree with your driver theory, but whatever. I'd love to know what the original cause was, but that will remain a mystery. About your HWiNFO screenshot, try this: Open Config, and in the Custom tab, scroll down until you find the SMART entries for your drives. Click on a SMART entry line, and see if the Original and Current labels for the drives match. When I add a new drive, the HWiNFO data can become confused. You don't seem to be using custom labels, so it may not apply to you. I do, and every time I add or change drives around, I must fix the label associated with the data. ------------- http://valid.x86.fr/48rujh" rel="nofollow">
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Posted By: EvilDragon
Date Posted: 05 Aug 2016 at 4:19pm
Yeah it will remain a mystery. If not for the driver theory, what would be your theory? Some sort of fallback compatibility mode for M.2 slot? But what would trigger that, if not for driver issues? :D Again, mystery!
I'll try this next time I need to use HWiNFO, but I think this update might have fixed EVERYTHING so now I might have ALL THE INFO ALL THE TIME everywhere, haha. :D Anyways, cheers! :) |
Posted By: parsec
Date Posted: 06 Aug 2016 at 12:46am
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Honestly, I don't even have a theory about why the SSD's speed was so reduced. Your first Magician Disk screenshot showed a normal 950 Pro. The M.2 interface was right, and the Samsung NVMe driver/controller information was perfect, both identical to my own, and I do not have the problem you did. One question, if you now look at the Magician software main Disk screen for your 950 Pro, what is shown in the Controller section, under System Information? Does it still show the Samsung 1.4.7.17 NVMe driver, or something else? The only something else would be the Microsoft NVMe driver. Your Device Manager information looked perfect too. Did you install Win 10 Anniversary as a new installation, or as an update installation? How did you install Windows the first time on the 950, when it was slow? Was that with Windows 10? Not the Anniversary version the first time of course, but was that a fresh installation? Did you have any other drives connected to the PC when you installed Windows on the 950 the first time? Otherwise, no differences in the UEFI/BIOS settings between the first and current Windows installation? Fortunately, we are not seeing any more reports of your (solved) problem. I always try new drives in a PC before I install Windows on them, to check if they are working correctly. Which means I used them with existing Windows installations. Always run benchmarks on the new drives, and the two 950 Pros I have always performed as they should during testing, and after being used for a Windows installation. Always fresh installations, no cloning of another installation. Since you bought that 950 from your friend, was it cleaned up or secure erased before you began using it? Did your friend use it as the OS drive? At this point, I am sure I don't know what happened in your case.  ------------- http://valid.x86.fr/48rujh" rel="nofollow">
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Posted By: EvilDragon
Date Posted: 06 Aug 2016 at 6:33pm
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Yes, it still shows 1.4.7.17 Samsung NVMe driver. Incidentally, link speed is still reported as 8x I installed Anniversary as update. Original installation of W10 was fresh, installed from a USB flash drive. My friend did use it as an OS drive but I did get it wiped. In any case - I am VERY happy that this works now. Phew! |